Man builds survival tomb to conquer taphephobia

"Under the shade of ficus trees stands the stone burial chapel that 73-year-old Freud de Melo built. Wind chimes tinkle above the wrought-iron door.

But it isn't a conventional final resting place. Inside the crypt, there's a TV, also a water pitcher and a fruit pantry. Fresh outdoor air flows in through four vents from the chapel roof. Within reach of the coffin are two makeshift megaphones -- plastic cones attached to tubes running out through the wall.

One Saturday recently, Mr. de Melo lay in the coffin, shouting into the cones in a voice that echoed into the countryside. "Help me! Come quick! I've been buried alive!"

See Mr. de Melo's burial vault, outfitted for survival in case of being buried alive.
It was only an equipment check -- not an actual emergency. Mr. de Melo, a resort operator and politician, built a burial vault he could survive in because he's gripped by a rare condition called taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive. "I have awful, awful nightmares of trying to dig myself out from underground," says Mr. de Melo, whose physician father named him, presciently, for the pioneer of dream analysis.

Mr. de Melo's life-affirming burial chapel has become one of the most talked about features of the eccentric tourist park he operates in Brazil's central hinterlands.

While Mr. de Melo's phobia may be over the top, fear of premature burial is one of the most chilling and persistent terrors. Fans of Halloween movie thrillers and people who relish a classic buried-alive story like the 1988 Dutch film "Spoorloos" ("The Vanishing"), have something in common with the ancient Greeks and Romans, who repeated tales of warriors and consuls, mistakenly thought dead, who rose up during their own funerals.

Fear of live burial crested in the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when medicine was comparatively unsophisticated and diseases like typhoid, cholera and plague sometimes caused people who were still alive to appear dead, says Melanie King, author of "The Dying Game: A Curious History of Death."

Overheated fiction stirred public fears about being buried alive. Edgar Allan Poe vividly evoked the claustrophobic terror of being trapped in a casket. "We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth -- we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost hell," he wrote in the short story "The Premature Burial."

See Mr. de Melo's spooky way of coping with his fear of being buried alive.
Such was his anxiety about waking up 6 feet under that George Washington left instructions that his body was not to be buried for three days after his passing, just to be safe. On foreign travels, the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen would leave a sign near his hotel bed reading "I am not dead" to make sure strangers didn't get the wrong idea.

In Germany around 1800, apparent death and premature burial were "given more attention than almost any other medical topic of the time," writes Jan Bondeson, author of the book "Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear." The Germans even set up a system of waiting mortuaries, or Leichenhäuser, where presumed corpses were laid out for observation for two or three days before burial, Dr. Bondeson writes. In one Munich mortuary, the bodies' fingers and toes were attached with strings to a great harmonium that would play if they stirred. The only time the bodies moved and the music sounded was when putrefaction set in and the corpses swelled up, he writes..."

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